IBM Watson graduated from medical school and went to work

Representatives of IBM and WellPoint held a joint conference at which they announced the start of commercial operation of the IBM Watson medical system. Six copies of IBM Watson are already “employed” in US hospitals as diagnostic doctors.

In two years of study, Watson studied 605 thousand medical documents, a total of 2 million pages of text. Before the beginning of the medical practice, the computer analyzed 25 thousand case histories and worked 14.7 thousand for fine tuning the algorithms. To replenish the knowledge base, IBM has entered into an agreement with Memorial Sloan Kettering , one of the leading cancer research centers, which has a huge archive of medical information. Watson can not only diagnose, but also determine the most optimal course of treatment. In many cases, it shows the accuracy of diagnosis is better than human doctors.

A representative of WellPoint at a press conference gave this example. The accuracy of prescribing optimal treatment after diagnosing lung cancer in US hospitals is 50%. That is, in half the cases, doctors recommend not the most ideal course of treatment and medications. So, IBM Watson's computer has an optimal treatment assignment accuracy of 90%. When calculating, he takes into account the slightest nuances from the medical record of the patient and his genetic information. The attending physician may, from his iPad, enter additional information into the Watson computer system in text form, for example, write "the patient had blood in the sputum during expectoration" —the computer will understand what has been said and in 30 seconds will issue a refined diagnosis and updated treatment.
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The design of the computer is also significantly improved. Previously, Watson occupied a whole room (pictured above), 10 server cabinets with 90 IBM Power 750 servers. In the original specifications, 2,800 processor cores and 15 terabytes of memory were indicated. It is clear that you can’t put such a system in the hospital. For installation in medical facilities, a client module was made “pizza-box-sized,” which uses computing resources in the cloud. At the same time, Watson's computing power increased by 240%, the press conference said.

WellPoint is the exclusive IBM Watson retailer for medical institutions and maintains the system. The computer can be bought or rented, and in the near future, a web portal will be launched to access the help system. WellPoint plans to sign up to 1600 medical institutions for the computer diagnostics service by the end of this year.